Archive for 2017
January 16, 2017
MAD DUCK: With days left in office, President Obama ushers in dozens of policies.
In the final days before President Obama leaves office, administration officials are rushing to complete dozens of tasks that will affect millions of lives and solidify the president’s imprint on history. But in many cases, their permanence is uncertain, and President-elect Donald Trump is already pledging to undo some of them after taking office.
“He is clearly using executive power aggressively and trying to do as much as possible in his final days,” Princeton University history and public affairs professor Julian Zelizer said in an email. “It is clear that a president who was once reluctant to use the power of his own office has changed his heart, especially now that he sees a radically conservative Congress and Republican president-elect are getting ready to dismantle much of what he has done.”
President Pen-and-Phone was reluctant?
And which is more radical: A popularly elected Congress passing bills for a president’s signature in a constitutional manner, or an outgoing executive during his last hours in office acting as a sort-of one-man autopen machine?
SALENA ZITO: Why Trump’s Inauguration Day will be better without celebs.
There will be no Beyoncé wiggling on stage. Bruce Springsteen, Ariana Grande, John Legend and Elton John aren’t going to be there either. In fact, pretty much every A-lister from the Hollywood and entertainment world has decided to skip Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday. And whether or not Trump himself is wrestling with that public rejection, the people who voted for him are not.
The “blue-collar billionaire” will have a day that’s more befitting of the working-class base that put him in the White House: one without fanfare or celebrities or fancy couture (although his wife, Melania, will most certainly be dressed to the nines). Call it the People’s Inauguration, one that celebrates the ordinary American, and that suits his fans just fine.
“They could have zero entertainment at the inauguration, and I really don’t think for one minute that it would matter,” said Leslie Rossi, of Youngstown, Pa., a state that shocked the nation when it switched from blue to red on Election Day.
Rossi, a 46-year-old mother of eight, and her husband, Michael, 51, were so confident Trump was going to win that they booked their rooms in DC last July.
Actually, I’d love it if they just administered the oath, had a short speech, and left it at that.
“I HAVE A DREAM.”
THAT’S BECAUSE OBAMA WAS A TERRIBLE PRESIDENT: The Obama years, which left us divided and angry, paved the way for the ascent of Donald J. Trump.
Start with the economy. It’s true that he inherited a wicked recession, that unemployment is much lower than when he entered office and that the stock market has reached an all-time high. On the flip side, the economic recovery has been unusually weak, with annual growth never exceeding 3 percent. (Until Mr. Obama, every president since Herbert Hoover had at least one year of 3 percent growth.) The labor force participation rate is at the lowest it has been since the 1970s. Since 2008, real wages have remained the same or fallen for the bottom four-fifths.
To make matters worse, the Obama presidency has been characterized by injurious incompetence, in particular with regard to his signature achievement, Obamacare. The unveiling of the website was a disaster, and the promises the president made — that Americans could keep their doctors and plans if they chose to — were false. Mr. Obama guaranteed lower insurance costs to families and lower health costs to the taxpayer; instead, costs rose. Several of the state-run exchanges appear to be headed for collapse.
Overseas, the Obama years have been defined by spreading disorder and chaos, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, with nations collapsing and borders dissolving. More terrorist safe havens have been established than ever before. Russia and China have become more aggressive and significantly increased their geopolitical influence. America is now held in brazen contempt by our enemies and mistrusted by many of our allies.
Yet in some respects the greatest failure of the Obama years is in the area where many people thought he would excel. Mr. Obama made the centerpiece of his 2008 campaign a promise to end a politics that “breeds division and conflict and cynicism.” In February of that year, I praised him for “a message that, at its core, is about unity and hope rather than division and resentment.” Yet he leaves office with America more conflicted and cynical than when he took office. More than 70 percent of Americans say the country is either more divided or no more united than it was in 2009. Race relations are the worst in decades, and our nation is as polarized as it has been in the modern era.
I wonder how many pieces like this will have to appear in the New York Times before the wall of denial collapses.
Plus:
Yet Mr. Obama never seemed to consider things from a different point of view from his own. He has shown withering disdain for his opponents, constantly impugning their motives even as he testified to the purity of his own. It was his arrogance that proved to be Mr. Obama’s undoing. (Even leaders of his own party felt Mr. Obama’s derision, as if dealing with them was somehow beneath him.) Mr. Obama dismissed those who disagreed with him like a professor forced to deal with simple-minded, wayward students.
And that arrogance and contempt, even more than his other failures, brought on Trump. Choose the form of your Destructor!
LEFTIST PUNDIT CHARLES PIERCE: CONSERVATISM FORCES SMART REPUBLICANS TO SAY ‘NUTTY STUFF:’
Esquire’s Charles Pierce readily concedes that Ben Carson (“an elite neurosurgeon”) and Mike Pompeo (“graduated at the top of his class at West Point”) are smart guys. In a way, though, they’re also tragic figures, he suggests, since they’ve “had to tailor their politics and their public personae to cater to the anti-rational, theocratic, anti-intellectual Id of modern conservatism…This means that both Carson and Pompeo have long histories of saying and writing things that sound like transmissions coming through their molars from Planet X.”
Related: “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”